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Found 306 article(s) in category 'Q2: Jobs?'

WHERE WILL JOBS COME FROM?

The posts collected here identify the firms, industries, and geographic locations where the jobs of the future will likely emerge. They also consider the public policies that have the best chance of fostering the types of jobs that will support a robust middle class.

Immigration and Economic Growth. George Borjas, May 2019, Paper, “Immigration is sometimes claimed to be a key contributor to economic growth. Few academic studies, however, examine the direct link between immigration and growth. And the evidence on the outcomes that the literature does examine (such as the impact on wages or government receipts and expenditures) is far too mixed to allow unequivocal inferences. This paper surveys what we know about the relationship between immigration and growth. The canonical Solow model implies that a one-time supply shock will not have any impact on steady-state per-capita income, while a continuous supply shock will permanently reduce per-capita income. The observed relationship between immigration and growth obviously depends on many variables, including the skill composition of immigrants, the rate of assimilation, the distributional labor market consequences, the size of the immigration surplus, the potential human capital externalities, and the long-term fiscal impact. Despite the methodological disagreements about how to measure all of these effects, there is a consensus on one important point: Immigration has a more beneficial impact on growth when the immigrant flow is composed of high-skill workers.” Link

Unemployment Insurance and Macroeconomic Stabilization. Gabriel Chodorow-Reich, 2019, Paper, “Unemployment insurance (UI) provides an important cushion for workers who lose their jobs. In addition, UI may act as a macroeconomic stabilizer during recessions. This chapter examines UI’s macroeconomic stabilization role, considering both the regular UI program which provides benefits to short-term unemployed workers as well as automatic and emergency extensions of benefits that cover long-term unemployed workers. We make a number of analytic points concerning the macroeconomic stabilization role of UI. First, recipiency rates in the regular UI program are quite low. Second, the automatic component of benefit extensions, Extended Benefits (EB), has played almost no role historically in providing timely, countercyclical stimulus while emergency programs are subject to implementation lags. Additionally, except during an exceptionally high and sustained period of unemployment, large UI extensions have limited scope to act as macroeconomic stabilizers even if they were made automatic because relatively few individuals reach long-term unemployment.” Link

An Industrial Policy for Good Jobs. Dani Rodrik, May 8, 2019, “So-called productive dualism is driving many contemporary ills in developed and developing countries alike: rising inequality and exclusion, loss of trust in governing elites, and growing electoral support for authoritarian populists. But much of the policy discussion today focuses on solutions that miss the true source of the problem.” Link

The Power of Workplace Rewards: Using Self-Determination Theory to Understand Why Reward Satisfaction Matters for Workers Around the World. Ashley Whillans, April 17, 2019, Paper, “How can workplace rewards promote employee well-being and engagement? To answer these questions, we utilized self-determination theory to examine whether reward satisfaction predicted employee well-being, job satisfaction, intrinsic motivation and affective commitment, as well as valuable organizational outcomes, such as workplace contribution and loyalty. Specifically, we investigated the role of three universal psychological needs—autonomy, competence and relatedness—in explaining whether and why reward satisfaction matters for employees’ well-being. We tested our model in a large, cross-sectional study with full-time employees working for multinational corporations in six main world regions: Asia, Europe, India, Latin America, North America and Oceania (N = 5,852). Consistent with our theorizing, we found cross-cultural evidence that reward satisfaction promoted greater employee functioning through psychological need satisfaction, contributing to better organizational outcomes. Critically, our results were consistent regardless of geographic location. As such, this study provides some of the strongest evidence to date for the power of understanding psychological mechanisms in the workplace: Regardless of the actual rewards that employees received, how workplace rewards made employees feel significantly predicted their optimal functioning.” Link

The Spatial Mismatch Between Innovation and Joblessness. Edward Glaeser, April 9, 2019, Paper, “American technological creativity is geographically concentrated in areas that are generally distant from the country’s most persistent pockets of joblessness. Should innovation policy attempt to engender more innovation is distressed areas? The primarily inventive parts of innovation policy, such as N.I.H. grants, can aid underperforming areas, possibly through health improvements that reduce the share of people on Disability Insurance, without any spatial reallocation. Moreover, since research funding is presumably already designed to maximize knowledge production, spatial reallocation may come at a considerable cost. The educational aspects of innovation policy, such as Pell Grants, work-study and Federal overhead reimbursement on grants, can reflect regional realities better and do more to encourage employment in distressed areas. Lifting the cap on H1B visas in poorer places can also enhance local human capital. Finally, there is particular scope for geographically targeted entrepreneurship policy, such as eliminating the barriers to new business formation near universities and in distressed places. Spatially targeted employment subsidies can also encourage more labor-intensive innovation in depressed areas.” Link

Equal Pay Day: closing the gender wage gap. Hannah Riley Bowles, April 1, 2019, Audio, “Today is Equal Pay Day so we’re going to spend the hour looking at the gender pay gap. Studies show that women working full-time make around 82 cents for every $1 that their male colleagues make. For women of color that divide is even larger. This hour, we’ll discuss why men continue to be paid more than women in the workplace, what role career choices and sex discrimination play in the disparity, and what can be done to shrink the gap. We’ll also talk about legislation that recently passed in the U.S. House of Representatives that would ensure equal wages for men and women. Our guests are JOCELYN FRYE, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and HANNAH RILEY BOWLES, senior lecturer at Harvard Kennedy School.” Link

Birds of a Feather: Estimating the Value of Statistical Life from Dual-Earner Families. Joseph Aldy, March 2019, Paper, “Economists have long employed hedonic wage analysis to estimate income-fatality risk trade-offs, but some scholars have raised concerns about systematic measurement error and omitted variable bias in the empirical applications of this model. Recent studies have employed panel methods to remove time-invariant individual-specific characteristics that could induce bias in estimation. In an analogous manner, this paper proposes to exploit assortative matching on risk attitudes within married couples to control for worker characteristics that are unobserved to the econometrician. I develop and implement a modified hedonic wage estimator based on a within-coupled differenced wage equation for full-time working married couples with the Current Population Survey Merged Outgoing Rotation Group over 1996-2002. The key assumption builds on the findings in the assortative matching literature that individuals often marry those who have common traits across many dimensions, including those that may influence worker wages and are correlated with observed occupational fatality risks.” Link

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